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Normal Science and Normal Kuhn. Review of Kuhn’S Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On

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Normal Science and Normal Kuhn. Review of Kuhn’S Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On www.avant.edu.pl/en AVANT, Vol. VI, No.3/2015 ISSN: 2082-6710 avant.edu.pl Normal Science and Normal Kuhn. Review of Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On Editors: William J. Devlin, Alisa Bokulich Publisher: Springer Release Date: 2015 Number of Pages: 199 Adam Tamas Tuboly Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest tuboly. adam@ btk. mta. hu Abstract 1962 marked an important point in intellectual history not only for historians, philosophers, sociologists and scientists but also for educated laymen. After a long and productive decade Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of Scien- tific Revolutions as Volume 2 Issue 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Uni- fied Science, edited (after the death of Otto Neurath) by Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris. 2012 marked another important date—it was the 50th anni- versary of Structure’s first edition. The many conferences, workshops and presentations were documented in special issues and collections; one of them is Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On, edited by William J. Devlin and Alisa Bokulich. The review aims to shed light on the collections relevance for current interdisciplinary studies. Keywords: Thomas Kuhn; Structure of Scientific Revolutions; philosophy of science; normal science; science studies. 1962 marked an important point in intellectual history not only for historians, philosophers, sociologists and scientists, but also for educated laymen. After a long and in many ways productive decade, Thomas Kuhn published his Structure of Scientific Revolutions (SSR hereafter) as Volume 2 Issue 2 of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited (after the death of Otto Neurath) by Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris. 2012 marked another im- portant date—it was the 50th anniversary of SSR’s first edition. The many 96 AVANT Vol. VI, No. 2-3/2015 conferences, workshops and presentations were documented in special issues and collections; one of them is Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions – 50 Years On, edited by William J. Devlin and Alisa Bokulich. 50 Years On is an important contribution to the constantly growing literature on Kuhn, along with the history and philosophy of science depicting certain new ways and recasting certain old ways in which we understand them. Due to the painstakingly detailed examination and reevaluation of logical em- piricism that took place in the last two decades, it is quite widely known that some members of the movement, like Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath, pur- sued interdisciplinary studies. They aimed to utilize knowledge and ideas from physics, mathematics, sociology, economics and psychology emphasizing their deep-rooted interrelatedness. Their reason to do so was the empirical underdetermination of scientific theories: given that empirical data do not determine unambiguously how to build up or choose between rival scientific theories, one shall investigate and keep an eye on various other branches of the sciences. Logical empiricists are, however, not known for their interdisciplinary or, as one might also say, science studies; it is Thomas Kuhn who, by defeating logi- cal empiricists, became the merger of canons, pushing their unrelated con- cerns in a common direction. Though the underdetermination of theories was not unknown for Kuhn, he motivated his inquiries in his first book, violating the institutionalized boundaries (The Copernican Revolution, Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1957), in the following way: since scientific concepts and theories are ideas, they could be investigated from the viewpoint of intellectual histo- ry, hence the philosophy of science needs to broaden its viewpoint and per- spective. Though many scholars have argued that the relation between Kuhn, Carnap and logical empiricism should be reevaluated in favor of the latter two (that is, by showing that Carnap’s and Kuhn’s projects were reconcilable and Kuhn did not kill logical empiricism from their point of view), Jonathan Y. Tsou argues otherwise in his contribution to the volume. His chapter is devoted to the reconsideration of the Carnap-Kuhn connection, and he tried to show that the newly emerged literature against the old thesis of Kuhn killing logical empiri- cism is just far-fetched. It is argued that “revisionist analyses fail to sufficient- ly acknowledge that Carnap’s linguistic frameworks are logical reconstruc- tions […], while Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions is motivated to pro- vide a naturalistic description of scientific change” (p. 52). Thus, says Tsou, the alleged similarities between Carnap’s and Kuhn’s views turn out to be superficial. 97 www.avant.edu.pl/en Tsou might be right about the differences of these scholars’ views, but the question is whether a Carnapian point of view could embrace the general nar- rative of Kuhn. According to the correspondence of Carnap (analyzed famous- ly by George Reisch), he can do that, and according to the bipartite metatheory of logical empiricism (put forward by Thomas Uebel), the naturalistic descrip- tion of actual scientific developments was just one wing of a broader concep- tion of philosophy of science that was also accepted, besides Frank and Neu- rath, by Carnap. But more importantly, and it is a different question, Carnap is just one representative of logical empiricism, thus contrasting his views with Kuhn is never enough. Kuhn allegedly contributed to the demise of logi- cal empiricism and not that of Carnap per se. Besides logical empiricism (or logical positivism and the inevitable break be- tween positivist and post-positivist science) the characterizing ideas and no- tions of past Kuhn-scholarship were incommensurability and its relation to relativism, truth, and the rationality of science along with progress in science. 50 Years On testifies that many (not all, of course) contemporary philosophers of science are not concerned anymore with these issues (though it should be mentioned that in his chapter Alexander Bird presents some old-fashioned received views). But even if they do, their approach echoes more nuanced and relaxed treatments of these issues. James A. Marcum, for example, discusses the “the evolving notion and role of the incommensurability thesis” in Kuhn’s oeuvre showing the continuously reflexive and intellectually receptive character of Kuhn’s accommodation to his critics. By touching also on the question of truth and realism Marcum’s chapter brings us to Michela Massimi’s contribution who asks such questions as “Was Kuhn some kind of relativist? Did he advocate a form of constructiv- ism? Or was he a mild realist, after all?” (p. 135). She reconstructs Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s Kantian realist and Ron Giere’s perspectival realist read- ing of Kuhn and formulates new challenges regarding the Kantian overtones in Kuhn’s philosophy. Finally, one of the editors, William J. Devlin presents an account of ”truth” in Kuhn’s philosophical enterprise. He shows how Kuhn tried to dismiss the notion of ”truth”’ (taken as the ”correspondence theory of truth”) altogether from (the philosophy of) science while maintaining that science aims at the knowledge of nature. Devlin argues that Kuhn could over- come this tension by accepting “the claim that science achieves the truth about nature, with the qualification that a new alternative theory of truth is introduced” (p. 161). His new theory is based on a Kantian distinction be- tween phenomenon and the independent world and claims that “science achieves knowledge of nature as the phenomenal world, but does not achieve the truth about nature as the independent world” (p. 162)—hence we got the “phenomenal-world correspondence theory of truth” which seems to be com- patible with the Kuhnian enterprise. 98 AVANT Vol. VI, No. 2-3/2015 Most of the papers, however, are concerned with such notions of and ap- proaches to SSR that fell off the radar right after its publication. These include normalcy and normal science, the generality and explanatory power of Kuhn’s scheme. Alan Richardson formulates some neat worries about the nature and role of philosophy and history of science against a Kuhnian back- ground. He claims that scholars should not “fret so much about the nature of their relationship as they try better to articulate their own explanatory practices” (p. 49). Cyrus C. M. Mody urges philosophers, historians and sociologists of science to focus on what Kuhn called “normal science” since “if we’re still interested in pushing the Kuhnian project forward, then knowing more about what scien- tists and engineers do all day is fundamental to understanding the structure both of scientific revolutions and of scientific normalcy” (p. 101). The ethnog- raphy of practicing scientists shows that Kuhn’s notion of normal science is too restrictive and needs an extension. “Normal science,” says Mody (p. 96), “achieves many more goals than just the clearing away of anomalies and open questions;” hence normal science demands more attention than revolutionary science if we wish to understand its nature and workings. The descriptive project of science is the subject of Steven Shapin and Alexan- der Bird. The former argues that to understand SSR we have to understand first its historical contexts and underpinnings given that it was “produced in a historically specific set of circumstances” (p. 12). Nonetheless, Shapin pro- vides only more or less general insights into the micro cosmos of Kuhn and instead looks at the overall settings of his project. He argues that Kuhn was thought to be anti-scientific, anti-rational and relativistic because he did not celebrate science uncritically for its own sake—Shapin does not assert wheth- er Kuhn tries to present a rational or irrational picture of science. Kuhn just described what he has found in scientific texts and among the practices be- hind those texts. While for many “science was too precious, and especially too fragile, a flower to be dealt with in an ordinary, matter-of-fact sort of way” (p.
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